The 20-year-old son of a Democratic state lawmaker in Tennessee was being cited on the Internet yesterday as a suspect in the hacking of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail.

State Rep. Mike Kernell told The Tennesseean newspaper that his son, David Kernell, a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, is the person being mentioned on blogs as the e-mail thief who bared Palin’s private correspondence to the world.

Kernell said he spoke to his son yesterday, but he declined further comment about the case.

The Justice Department said yesterday that it had launched a probe to find the hacker.

“I am the lurker who did it, and I would like to tell the story,” one person wrote in an account circulated on the Web.

In postings under the name “Rubico,” he wrote that he reset Palin’s e-mail password using her birth date, ZIP code information and where she met her husband, Todd.

When the security question was posed on her Yahoo! account, the hacker answered, “Wasilla high,” and tapped into her e-mail.

He had easily used public information to outsmart Yahoo!’s security system.

“It took seriously 45 minutes on wikepedia [sic] and google to find the information. Birthday? 15 seconds on wikepedia, zip code? Well she had always been from Wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!),” the hacker boasted.

“The second was somewhat harder, the question was ‘where did you meet your spouse?’ Did some research, and apparently she had eloped with Mr. Palin after college.

“I found out later through more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on ‘Wasilla high.’ ”

“I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower,” he said.

The hacker said he was disappointed because he found “nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I hoped.”

The FBI has already contacted the proxy service operator that the hacker used to try to disguise his identify.

Gabriel Ramuglia, owner of the Ctunnel.com site, said he was contacted by the FBI and would turn over relevant information to ID Palin’s tormentor.

“Hacking is against the terms of my service. I reserve the right to cooperate with law enforcement,” Ramuglia, 25, told The Post.

The hacker admitted he was worried about being caught.

“Yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this s- – – ever got to the FBI I was f- – – -d, I panicked, I still wanted the stuff out there . . . so I posted the [information] . . . and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state.”

Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said: “The fact that a Democratic activist – and possibly an Obama supporter – could go to these lengths is deeply disturbing and criminal.”